Abstract
Several studies have mentioned the differentiation between Western and Asian cultures in terms of people’s backgrounds, life styles, and perspectives. In particular, in cruise tourism, tourists from China have shown different behavior from Western tourists. Previous research has investigated the preferences of cruise tourists. However, there have been few systematic studies of their preferences. Thus, it is necessary to examine cultural uniqueness with a systematic method. Therefore, the main purpose of the study is to apply a choice experiment (CE), which is a scientific method for understanding Chinese tourists’ preferences for a given attribute as a form of marginal willingness-to-pay, and to identify their priorities. In order to collect the data from an online data platform, the answers from 244 Chinese were used for multinomial logit analysis. The study results demonstrate that the respondents placed the highest value on having a variety of shopping items in duty-free shops on board. Furthermore, room type, percentage of traditional Chinese food served, and touring in ports of call were also statistically significant attributes. The conclusion and the implications of this study will be discussed.
Highlights
The cruise industry worldwide has been growing rapidly, and the number of cruise travelers has been increasing steadily [1,2,3,4,5]
Michael Thamm, the CEO of the world’s leading cruise company, ‘Costa’, maintains that Chinese cruise tourism should be seen as a promising market [51]
In Korea, the cruise market is growing—Chinese cruise tourists visiting the country accounted for about 92 percent of all cruise tourists by 2016 [52]
Summary
The cruise industry worldwide has been growing rapidly, and the number of cruise travelers has been increasing steadily [1,2,3,4,5]. The annual number of cruise tourists increased from 20.9 million in 2012 to 24 million in 2015 worldwide [6]. Chinese cruise tourists account for a large portion in the cruise market, and their number is continuously increasing [3,7]. According to the Korean Maritime Institute [8], a think tank developing Korean policies on marine affairs, Chinese cruise tourists accounted for 92% of inbound cruise travelers to Korea. The Korean cruise industry is trying hard to attract more Chinese incentive tourists [11]
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